Share Your Shame: Cool World (1992)

So, share your shame. When first faced with this task, my first thought was “this is going to be difficult”. I pride myself on my DVD collection and felt as though every one of those slim plastic cases were a carefully selected piece of my personality…until I looked over them again.

It seems I have films on my shelf that are not only bad, but I personally do not like them. It’s moments like this you wonder where your mind was when you picked it up and took it to the counter.

The film I have chosen may not be familiar to all because I’m pretty sure after it was released and bombed at the box office, it was locked away in a wooden box and stored in a large warehouse overlooked by ‘Top Men’…until it escaped and now seeks sanctuary on my shelf.

Cool World directed by animation legend Ralph Bakshi was released in 1992 and was critically massacred. Much like the superior ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’ it blends live action with hand drawn animation.

I’d read about the film a few years ago and after watching the trailer I became so curious the many thousands of reviews slating this film couldn’t prevent me from ordering a copy. I was so excited when it arrived I watched it immediately.

The plot sees imprisoned cartoonist, Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne), transported into his comic book creation ‘Cool World’. There he is seduced by, Holli Would, voiced by Kim Basinger (and later played by her in live action sequences) so she can escape into the real world. However this would have dire consequences for both worlds and so Jack teams up with, Frank Harris (Brad Pitt) a police officer in Cool World to take her back.

Needless to say, the plot is terrible. After looking into the history of the film, I learnt that Bakshi pretty much wrote a completely different script and the one on display here is written by studio executives. However as bad as the film is, Kim Basinger’s acting is something to behold, the film still holds a certain place in my heart. I guess as a fan of Bakshi’s art and animation (and 90s animation in general) I am able to appreciate all those elements and block out the flawed story and wooden performances.

But even though I know it has a certain essence that I appreciate, if anyone were to see it whilst browsing my collection, I would probably tell them it’s a pile of crap and to not bother watching it.

Tom Batt